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Emmitt Smith paid Ezekiel Elliott about the highest compliment possible

Connor O'Gara

By Connor O'Gara

Published:

The comparison is an easy one.

Ezekiel Elliott is going to be likened to Emmitt Smith a lot. Just get used to it.

The NFL’s all-time leading rusher was admittedly surprised that the Cowboys chose to pick Elliott in the first round. He thought his former team would target a defender.

But that wasn’t a slight at Elliott. In fact, we found out soon that Smith is about as high as possible on the former Ohio State back.

How do we know that? Check out this sequence he had on Twitter on Friday afternoon:

That’s quite the statement to begin with. But it was how Smith responded to a random comment that really said it all:

That’s an unprompted response. Frankly, it doesn’t get much better than that.

Smith could’ve meant that Elliott was a better prospect coming out of college. Smith, of course, was the No. 17 selection by the Cowboys in the 1990 NFL draft after he was a unanimous All-American at Florida. He set the league’s all-time rushing record en route to first-ballot Hall of Fame honors.

If anybody else in the world said that Elliott was better than Smith, they’d be told to pump the breaks. But coming from Smith, that’s about as much praise as you’ll see for a guy who’s never played an NFL game.

Connor O'Gara

Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Tradition. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.